Time audit: first full week

Despite any claims I make about being a hermit, I spent 23 hours just hanging out with people last week.

16 hours on social media, 12 hours on driving.

14ish hours on doing music stuff. (Record-keeping or open mics or anything inside or out of the house.)

8 hours just preparing for things (like, to go to work in the morning or whatnot).

5 hours vegging or journaling.

5 hours dancing... ^^ (I think that includes the potluck.)

That's 83 hours. Of the 168 hours that are in one week. Non-work, non-sleep hours. 50% of my week.


Then there are about 7 categories that are less than 3 hours: church; eating; cleaning; errands; etc. 7% of my week.


Then there's work (27, I am only part-time during non-summer months) and sleep (46). 43% of my week.




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In general, I probably do not have 23 hours each week to hang out. It was an odd week. Plus the hanging out does include some time that should have been allotted to "church" because it's a kinship group.

I also don't have 16 hours to be on social media. F'cripesake. But I think what I'll do is step myself down. Try to get it to an hour a day instead of 2. I've tried cold turkey and other stringent methods and I just go right back. To be honest, just logging the time has helped me to at least stop being on Facebook after midnight, which is pretty huge.

I need to start thinking of prep time for work as part of a time block that also includes work and the driving time. It's so strange how my mind currently isn't wired this way.

Time and how I perceive it

Well, my experiment in auditing time was a failure for last week, because, HOLIDAYS! I'm starting anew with the new year.

Here's some preliminary findings, though:

• Social Media time averages 2 hours EVERY DAY
  
• My mind thinks that it takes no time to get ready to go somewhere. So I was confused when I had to categorize blocks of time I spent preparing to go places. It's still weird.
  
• I only spend about a quarter of my time asleep.
  
• During Christmas week, zero hours were allocated to practicing, 16 allocated to hanging out, and 12 hours on social media. Hmmmmm.
  

Christmas makes you spend time differently.

Realizing that the Christmastime season isn't a good time to do my time audit, but I have a super-cool spreadsheet to put things in now. (I designed it myself because I'm nerdy like that.) Plus, it's good to do a little dry run so that I can figure out how it's going to work. For example, some of the time I spent doing errands yesterday was technically spent driving, but I didn't count it that way, so I need to figure out how and why I want to do that bit.

The chart automatically adjusts when I put numbers in ^^

If anything, this exercise is just helping me to be more aware of things like, when I'm on the computer and not working on the mile-long list of Stuff I Gotta Get Done Today.

I would like to add that I don't ordinarily ever sleep this good. Data is definitely being skewed by something or other.

TIme audit

I began an experiment today.

I'm auditing my time. I'm tracking how much time I spend doing what during the day.

Time is valuable. You track finances. Time is easily equally important. I realize if I feel crunched for time, the best thing to do is to try to get an honest look at where it's going.

Today's revelation:

WORK: 6.25 hours (41%)
HANGOUT/JAM: 4 hours (26%)
SOCIAL MEDIA: 2 hours (12 %)
DRIVING: 1 hour (6%)
PREPARING FOR THINGS: 1 hour (6%)
MEETINGS: 1 hour (6%)
LESSON: 1/2 hour (3%)

Oddly, my two income sources are sandwiched, there. The one I spend the least amount of time on earns me my best hourly wage.

Hmmmmmm.

I can DEFINITELY cut back on social media. (What was I really doing on facebook for two hours that was *SO* important???)